The ship might not even have travelled by warp to the Delta Quadrant even if it had warp capability, it could quite easily have fallen through a wormhole.
Then why would the writers have made it a sleeper ship in the first place? That makes no sense. The only reason the writers would have chosen to make it a sleeper ship is that they intended it to have taken a long time to get there. That's confirmed by their use of a 22nd-century design.
I am also not sure if the technology exists even in the 24th century to power a warp drive for such an extended period of time, never mind in the 22nd century.
The whole point of a sleeper ship is to save power by minimizing life support needs, and to enable a ship to be smaller and lighter because it doesn't need to carry enough food, water, air, furnishings, etc. to support a large, active crew. Both of those would free up more fuel for the engines and let them operate for a more prolonged period.
It also makes sense that it takes more power to initiate a warp bubble than to maintain it once it's settled in. And we know from the
TNG Tech Manual that accelerating to a higher warp factor causes the power usage to ramp up considerably, then drop back down once a new stable configuration is achieved (the integer warp factors are the stable, lowest-power ones). So it seems reasonable to assume that it takes less power to maintain a stable warp bubble at a constant velocity than it does to make frequent stops, starts, and course changes -- sort of like how a car gets better mileage on the highway than in the city.
It's a stretch, yes, but no more so than a ton of other things in
Star Trek (like how ships in
Strange New Worlds are able to make interstellar journeys in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks). Ultimately, it's all made up, and any assumption we make about how the technology should work can be thrown out by a single line of dialogue.
We also have to consider the various obstacles that would have been in the way of the sleeper ships journey to the Delta Quadrant. Just how far in to this quadrant did the Tellarite ship go? Did it have to traverse Borg Space at all?
Probably not, since we know Tars Lamora is close to the Beta-Delta border (since Dal was familiar with a star formation that was mentioned in a late-season
Voyager episode). So we're talking a journey of maybe 35,000 light years from Tellar, just a little across the border from Beta.
If the entire journey was conducted via warp, then who was maintaining the warp core and engineering whilst the ship was on its long journey to the Delta Quadrant?
We were literally shown the answer to that in last week's episode. The ship's AI awoke the passengers to do any necessary repairs along the way.
When Jankom’s family (could be Tellarite royalty)
No. The whole "royalty" thing started when Barniss Frex mentioned to Jankom that Tellarites were one of the Federation's founding species, and Jankom, having a poor understanding of Federation egalitarianism, jumped to the conclusion that Tellarites as a species were Federation royalty.
